


Chopsticks

by Liviapenn



Category: Ocean's Eleven (2001)
Genre: Community: takethehouse, F/M, Heist, M/M, Pre-Canon, Pre-Movie, bifictional
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-06-07
Updated: 2005-06-07
Packaged: 2017-10-04 01:14:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liviapenn/pseuds/Liviapenn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Only one room was locked. Danny picked it the old-fashioned way, circumspect and careful. (Set ten years before Ocean's Eleven.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chopsticks

**Author's Note:**

> This was a pinch-hit for Victoria P.'s Take The House ficathon (takethehouse on livejournal.) Thanks to speshope, jamjar and rabican for their thoughts.

The selection in the liquor cabinet was impressive. The pantry was loosely stocked with tortilla chips, artificially colored cereal, gummi bears and beer. Danny checked the fridge last, finding half a jar of cocktail olives, some gourmet barbecue sauce and store brand grape jelly.

He moved on, exploring the rest of the dark, unnaturally clean house. Three empty bedrooms, then the one that was obviously Rusty's, neat as a hotel room half an hour before check-out. There was a bag of gummi bears on the nightstand and a nondescript duffel bag tucked neatly under the bed.

Only one room was locked. Danny picked it the old-fashioned way, circumspect and careful. The room contained a various assortment of surveillance equipment, and also the only light fixtures in the house that looked more than two months old. The videotape equipment and surveillance monitors were well-kept, but the hardwood floor had been scratched to hell and back. Empty soda cans and cigarette butts hadn't been cleaned up so much as kicked up against the walls. They spilled out in drifts from the dark crevices in between the large cardboard boxes stacked full of audio cassettes and VHS tapes.

They were labeled: Senator So-and-So. Congressman Whats-his-face. Dates and times. Danny picked one up and thought about watching it. Probably a felony. Probably incredibly boring.

"There's no porn," Rusty said from the doorway.

Danny stayed crouched above the box. "Is that the truth, the whole truth and nothing but?"

There was a silence, the exact length and breadth of Rusty's you-do-not-amuse smirk. "There's no porn _downstairs_."

Danny put the tape back where he'd found it. "I gotta say I'm with Bobby on this one. The thought of you working for the Feds is more than a little obscene."

"Huh," Rusty said. His shadow disappeared from Danny's peripheral vision. Danny followed. It took him twelve seconds to get the door locked again the way he'd found it. Not that anybody was counting, necessarily.

He followed the sound of a plastic bag rustling, the pop of an jar opening, and found Rusty in the kitchen. He had his feet propped up on the table, the grape jelly open in front of him and the other hand buried in a bag of tortilla chips.

Danny chose not to comment.

Rusty dipped a chip in the jelly and ate it, very deliberately. He looked good, Danny had to admit. He was living on crap, he was working for the Man, but he looked good. "How was Boston?"

Danny blinked.

"The old Blue Boy schtick. I can't believe that worked, but that's Bobby for you. Chutzpah, they call it. Now, the Vermeer went to Faulk, right? And the Manet to one of the new wannabe players out of Japan. You're hanging on to the Degas pieces till you can get ahold of Mehmet and Aydin, and Bobby shopped the Rembrandt himself, 'cause he knows the guy with the things in the place. But you," Rusty said, licking jelly off the side of his thumb, "you took the eagle for yourself."

Danny rubbed at his jaw. It wasn't that he _couldn't_ but more that he didn't care to stop the smile playing on his lips. "Maybe."

"So it _was_ you guys," Rusty swung his feet down from the table. "Bobby wouldn't say yes or no, close-mouthed bastard."

"Of course he wouldn't," Danny said, stung. "You weren't on the job." It didn't really count as giving anything away if Rusty had already known, he told himself. And Rusty always knew. "You were here, working for--"

Rusty held up a hand, eyes fluttering closed as if he already knew what Danny was thinking. Which he did, but this was one of those times when it would really be best for Danny's blood pressure if Rusty just let him spit it out already. "Do just one thing for me."

When did I ever do just one thing for you, Danny pointedly didn't say. Rusty nodded apologetically anyway, then twisted in his seat, stretching over to the phone on the counter and grabbing the notepad next to it. He uncapped the pen with his mouth, jotting down a number with the cap held between his teeth, then proffered it to Danny.

"Go to the payphone on the corner, call this number. Ask about Simon Robertson DeClinton."

Danny took the paper.

"I'll order in," Rusty said, and capped the pen. "You still like sweet and sour pork?"

* * *

"Chase Manhattan Bank, Mary Anne speaking, how may I help you?"

"Mary Anne, hi," Danny said. He tilted his head back, looking across the street at the wet green lawn sloping up to the dark house. "This is Oliver Goldman, with Goldman, Miller and Bradley, and I have a question regarding the account of a Mr. Simon Robertson DeClinton."

"Yes, sir?"

"Well, our firm is in the process of maybe doing some business with Mr. DeClinton and I was wondering if you could just confirm some of the basic facts I have down here."

"Oh, of course. I'll connect you to one of our bank officers, it'll just be one moment, sir. Please hold."

* * *

There was a drink waiting for Danny when he got back in. When he picked it up, it left a heavy ring of moisture on the table. He looked around for something to swipe it up with, but there wasn't anything, no dishtowel by the sink, no napkins on the counter. Rusty had made it about halfway through the bag of chips, and a quarter of the way through the jelly. He had one foot up on the seat of the chair and was hunched forward, smiling like he always did when he wanted to share something good.

Danny sighed, pulled out a chair and sat down. "Nine hundred mil buys a lot of gummi bears."

"It's not really there," Rusty said. "They just say it is."

"'They' being the FBI."

"Oh no," Rusty said, "that was the bank you talked to. That's the beauty of it. Anyone asks about DeClinton, they get routed to a special answer guy who has been instructed _by_ the Feds to confirm any inquiries related to Project East Wind."

"East Wind. You come up with that?"

Rusty shook his head. "Agent Wallace. Very poetic soul."

Danny rubbed one hand over his face. "All right," he said, "all right. Explain it to me slow."

Rusty explained. Maybe a little more slowly than absolutely necessary, but that was all right, because Danny was drinking his whisky a little faster than was absolutely necessary, especially on top of an empty stomach and the sleep-debt from the Gardner job with Bobby that he still hadn't quite paid back.

Abscam had been ten years ago. He and Rusty had still been wet behind the ears for that one. But anyone in the business knew the story. Back in eighty-one, the Feds had set up a fake Arabic high-roller, a sheik interested in American investments and in making friends in high places. Significant sums of money had been waved under the collective noses of a number of congressmen.

"Amateurish job, you look back on it. Even they'll admit it-- you wouldn't believe some of the shit Wallace has told me," Rusty said through a mouthful of chips and jelly. "But they managed to hook half a dozen congressmen, a senator. Even a mayor."

"Yeah, a mayor from _Jersey_." Danny said. "So that's what East Wind is, just Abscam redux? Feds cleaning house and you're their cleaning lady?"

"Who are you calling a lady?"

Danny rolled his glass between his hands, trying to look disappointed. Trying not to _be_ as disappointed as he felt. "So you talk the big shots into taking a fat payoff while three chain-smoking Fibbies sit up in that locked room and film you like some kind of zoo animal."

"Zoo animal?" Rusty laughed. "I would've thought you'd say 'like a porn star.' You know, the analogy you had going on before." Danny scowled, but Rusty smiled like a Buddha and cast his eyelashes down like a Southern belle. "Wait for it," he said to his reflection, golden and glossy in the shiny wood of the table. "Wait for it."

"Wait for what?" Danny said, but Rusty only looked innocent. "Come on, Rus. How easy is it to get a politician to take a bribe? You gotta be going nuts."

"I fill the minutes," Rusty said. The phone rang. He went to answer it, taking his drink but leaving the chips. Danny reached for them and started snacking, ignoring Rusty's knowing look.

"'Lo? Yeah, speaking." Rusty said. "Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Oliver Goldman, with Goldman, Miller and Bradley? New York... Wait, let me get a pen," he said, and sipped his drink. "Miller... Bradley. Right. Got it. No, you know how it goes. You ask these guys for the good faith money, they're gonna want to check you out, but they're tricky, they'll do it through third parties..."

Rusty wound the phone cord around his finger idly, and the coil of it wrapped around his wrist, catching his sleeve and dragging it up. Danny shook his head, brushing salt off his fingers as he noted the dark, sharp-edged coils just above the bone of Rusty's wrist. Rusty always said tattoos were the only investment you couldn't lose, but if that one kept spreading like it had been doing, a long-sleeved shirt wouldn't cover it. The chips were making him thirsty, and he took another drink of his whisky. The take-out would be here soon, he told himself.

"Goldman's probably some fishing buddy of Thompson or Tate," Rusty continued. "I pushed Tate kinda hard last Friday, y'know. This is good, shows he's thinking about it seriously, shows he's biting. Uh-huh. Yeah, sure. Hey, is Wallace around? Yeah, okay, never mind then. Thanks for the call, man. See ya Monday."

Danny was setting his glass back down on the table when a thought occurred to him, and the slick glass nearly slipped from his grip. It rattled, then settled on its base, and he tilted his head and looked across the table at Rusty.

"So you have a house, here..."

"And an office in town. Phone line, car. Even a secretary."

"Cute?"

"Not so's you'd notice. Well, maybe _you_ would, you always did like 'em skinny. But go on-- you were saying."

Danny barely even noticed the dig. His fingers were tingling and it wasn't just the booze. "You have a Chase Manhattan Bank officer who tells your marks that you're good as gold. You have a pet Fed who tells _you_ when your marks are about to bite."

"Yep."

"And you've just been sitting on this? Jesus, Rusty, why didn't you call me two months ago?"

Rusty shrugged one shoulder. "Who knows when you'll get a chance to do a job like that with Bobby again?"

"Yeah," Danny said, the wind taken out of his sails momentarily. "We're up on the third floor, I'm taking a Degas right out of the frame, and he's talking about how he wants to spend more time with Caroline and the kid. I guess you have to respect that, but..."

"Yeah, I know. How old's the kid, like thirteen?" Rusty said through a mouthful of chips.

"Fifteen, sixteen maybe." Danny drummed his fingers on the table, working out the angles in his head. They were big boys now, anyway. They didn't need Bobby on this one. God, it was like it had been tailor-made for the two of them. Easy like chopsticks but big enough to really pay off.

"Man. Doesn't that make you feel old?" Rusty said. There was jelly on the corner of his mouth.

"What?" Danny was already way past that. "So you have credentials?"

Rusty nodded, eyebrows raised.

"You have _official_, legitimately issued credentials setting you up as an agent for this foreign investor, DeClinton?"

"Yep."

"You have next Wednesday off?" Danny said, and Rusty smiled.

There was a knock at the door, and Danny reached for his wallet, following Rusty out into the hall. "You need--"

"Nah, nah, I got it. Oh, didn't I mention the expense account?" There were thick glass panels on either side of the door, wine-red and patterned with black obelisques. Clear invitations to anybody looking for a smash-and-grab, but they also allowed a clear view of the front steps while preventing anyone outside from being able to see in. Rusty checked outside, then froze with his hand on the doorknob.

"What, who is it?" Danny looked out over his shoulder. There was a nondescript black car parked down the street a bit, and a figure making its way up the sidewalk to the house. A woman, blonde hair peeking out from a black scarf. Her generous curves were undisguised by the nondescript brown trenchcoat wrapped around her body.

"Hm," Rusty said.

"Who's that--" Danny said, turning, and he knew, he _knew_ even before he saw the crooked grin. Rusty stood by the open hall closet, one hand on the doorknob, gesturing. Danny moved quickly. The door clicked shut behind him just as the sharp rap of the blonde's knuckles echoed in the hall.

"Why, Agent Wallace," Rusty said, opening the front door.

"Mr. Ryan," she said, her voice low and vaguely Southern. Her shoes, a heavy and businesslike pair by the sound, bumped across the threshold. The door closed behind her. "Rusty..."

"Kate," Rusty said desperately, and there was a soft thump, something like the sound of two entangled bodies moving as one to fall against a recently closed door.

"Mmmm," Rusty said, two minutes and thirty-four seconds later, "mm. You stayin' for dinner? I ordered Chinese. Extra potstickers, sweet and sour pork..."

"My favorites," said Agent Wallace, breathless. "How'd you know I was coming?"

"Didn't know," Rusty confessed. "Just hoped."

"Like you couldn't eat twice as much take-out as any normal person anyway." In Danny's opinion, Agent Wallace's idea of flirting left a lot to be desired.

"You know me too well," Rusty said. The hall closet wasn't the dustiest or the rankest hiding place Danny had ever been crammed himself into, but he held in his sigh anyway. It'd be stupid to sneeze now. He couldn't hear Rusty's footsteps, but as Wallace's sensible shoes clomped past the closet he barely had time to tense, remembering the two glasses of whisky on the kitchen table, before Rusty caught Agent Wallace and pulled her into what was either a choke hold or a kiss, judging by the surprised squeak.

"Oh! My glasses-- Rusty!"

A kiss, then.

Danny leaned back against the closet wall and slid ever so slowly down to a sitting position on the floor. What do we have, he thought quickly. Credentials, an office, and a phone line with a secretary. A house, a car. A Fed who likes Rusty. He tapped it out on his knee with his fingers, already thinking big.

He'd have to let Rusty handle all the face work. When East Wind was done and the Feds brought the hammer down, Rusty would be their chief witness, the one signing off on depositions and making sure the charges stuck. That, plus the fact that Agent Wallace had a soft spot for him, meant Rusty and Danny's freelance work might slip under the radar, as long as they played it--

"Here? Rusty! I-- oh!"

\--the hell, Danny thought, his mind forcibly jerked off-track. Okay, Rusty could be provoking sometimes. There was the whole 'personal space' issue Danny had tried to explain to him a couple of times already, but. He wouldn't-- he really wouldn't--

"Oh, sugar lips! Yes!"

He did.

_Really_ did. A couple of times. With a leisurely break in the middle for Chinese food. The third time Agent Wallace started giggling and pretending to be shocked at Rusty, Danny was ready to start banging his head against the closet door. So what if Wallace _did_ have a gun. He brought his hands up carefully and rubbed at his temples.

It hadn't even been _him_ who'd made the crack about Rusty being a porn star, had it. Jesus, three fucking times, with the scent of sweet and sour pork still lingering. Danny's mouth watered.

"You're so amazing," Rusty was gasping, "you make me feel, I don't even know..."

"Oh, you're crazy," Wallace murmured, "_I'm_ crazy-- don't stop--"

And okay. Danny would probably never think very highly of anyone who sat down and ate Chinese food out of a take-out container right there on the same floor where they'd just screwed someone. Someone who was _technically_ a co-worker. But he also couldn't help thinking: got it in one, sister. Who could blame her? It was Rusty.

Danny had come back, after all, walked right into a converted FBI safehouse which he'd _known_ was a converted FBI safehouse with bugs and cameras everywhere, up and down the block and in the damn bathroom-- what kind of deals did they expect Rusty to do in the bathroom?

He'd come back for Rusty, and not because Rusty was the best detail man in the business.

Not _just_ because of that, anyway.

* * *

"Rise and shine, campers!"

Danny flinched back as Rusty kicked him in the leg, waking him from his queasy sleep. He swung up an arm to block the light flooding into the closet, and Rusty took it, hauling him to his feet. His hair was rumpled, his jacket crumpled somewhere by the front door, his shirt hanging on by two buttons. The tattoo had spread up his shoulder, looping over his collarbone. He smelled like hours of sex.

"Sorry," Rusty said, running a hand back through his hair. "Agent Wallace likes to be thorough."

"I know!" Danny said. "I was there." God, his _ass_ was asleep. He could barely feel his toes. "She's gone?"

"Yeah. I ordered a pizza." Rusty offered as Danny stomped his feet, trying to get some feeling back. He closed his eyes for a second, knowing exactly what the toppings would be. Rusty didn't let him down. "Everything on it, extra olives, no onions. Right?"

Clearly Rusty was trying to seduce him.

"Look," Danny said. "Clearly you're trying to seduce me."

"Nah," Rusty said. "Just flirting. When I get to seduction I'll be sure to let you know."

Danny came up with exactly nothing by way of snappy comebacks, and blamed it on his empty stomach. "Okay."

"Listen, speaking of seduction," Rusty said, taking Danny's arm and pulling him into the kitchen. "About Wallace."

"What, you don't have to _explain_," Danny said, vaguely horrified at how girly everything was suddenly becoming now that the unspoken had become spoken. "It's business."

"Of course it's business," Rusty said, dropping into the chair that Danny had vacated an hour ago. "Well, it's not just business."

Danny leaned back against the doorframe, raising his eyebrow.

"Look, she's intimidating. Guys get nervous around a woman who's armed. They gotta treat her like crap just to feel like _men_. The last guy she was with was married with kids, kept stringing her along for months telling her he was going to get a divorce. Where do you go from there? Only up-- unless you start screwing the con you brought on the job for his insight on the deviant processes of the criminal mind."

"Yeah, well," Danny said. "You're hot."

"You still have those Degas sketches?"

"Yeah," Danny said, marvelling at how they were playing it. Just another back and forth game, just another conversational gambit. It wasn't as if they didn't already know everything about each other that was worth knowing, but he still would have thought that getting the sex part of it out in the open would feel... more strange.

It really didn't, though.

"But you still can't reach Mehmet and Aydin. Not surprising after that thing with Hofstadt. You don't want to go through a fence, though. Give me a couple weeks and I'll slap something together that'll draw them out."

"And this has what to do with--"

There was a knock at the door, and Rusty buttoned up his shirt more, brushing past Danny on his way to get the pizza. At least Danny hoped it was food for real this time. "You run a Friendly Call on Wallace, I'll do a Mighty Casey for Mehmet and Aydin. They'll come running."

* * *

Danny refused to think about it-- about anything, really-- until he had at least three slices of pizza in him. Rusty had actually saved him two potstickers, but Danny wasn't really hungry for Chinese any more. Night had fallen while he was stuck in the hall closet, and there was nothing out any of the windows in the house but sheer blackness. His eyes kept getting drawn back to Rusty, to the curve of his rumpled collar and the way it framed the love bite on his neck. The way his hands moved as he picked the toppings off two separate pieces of pizza and left the cheese and crust alone.

"A Friendly Call," he finally said.

Rusty nodded. "If you feel up to it."

Danny narrowed his eyes. "You know that the Friendly Call hasn't worked since... well, since _feminism_."

"Women love romance," Rusty insisted, gesturing with a potsticker clamped between two wooden chopsticks. His air of boundless expertise probably would've worked better on someone who hadn't seen him get beaten up by an exotic dancer in Miami Beach that one time. "They love getting pursued, they love feeling desirable, they love breaking hearts."

"You just don't want her realizing you're playing her."

"Well, yeah. Also I'm not _playing_ her. I haven't lied to her at all, and I knew you'd be around sooner or later." Rusty ate the potsticker. "So. You court Wallace, she falls for you. Breaks my heart and feels sorry for me. Women always feel really tender about broken hearts, especially when they're the cause."

'Tender' would not exactly be the first word Danny would have used to describe Bambi Lowenstein that night in Miami Beach, but he let it pass.

"And then when it's my time to disappear," Rusty said, "I don't end up getting--"

"Shot?"

"Arrested."

"And I'm left-- I won't say holding the bag. But who do I get to take the intimidatingly-armed Agent Wallace off _my_ hands?"

Rusty rolled his eyes, chewing on a piece of sausage, as if to say 'I can't think of everything.'

"Very romantic, sugar lips." Danny reached for the last piece of pizza, not really expecting to get away with it, but Rusty let him have it.

Danny was pretty sure that moved them past 'just flirting.'

"Listen," Rusty said before he could say anything. He stretched his arms out, then scratched his elbow idly. "I'm about to pass out, and quite honestly Wallace emptied my clip, if you get what I'm saying. But we could go lay down and cuddle and you could tell me all your big ideas."

Danny gave him the all-purpose blank look, the one he tried not to use often enough to make it obvious that Rusty could still throw him off.

"Fine, jesus, twist my arm, I'll blow you," Rusty said wearily, pitching the empty Chinese food carton into the trash can at the end of the kitchen. The voice was perfect, the slump of his shoulders, but his expression betrayed him; his wicked, conspiratorial smile was enough to make Danny's heart jump as he turned towards the doorway.

Danny reached out and caught his wrist, and Rusty stopped. Danny could feel Rusty's pulse under his fingers, slow and steady. The kitchen was quiet, and the night outside silent. He moved his thumb up to brush the very lowest edge of Rusty's tattoo.

"I've mentioned this tattoo might be the dumbest thing you've ever done, right?"

"Yeah," Rusty said. "Might be."

**Author's Note:**

> This story is in response to the prompt, "Danny/Rusty, a caper." It takes place in 1990, about eleven years before "Ocean's Eleven" and two or three years before Danny and Tess met. The job I gave Danny and Bobby to work on was a real theft. Mehmet and Aydin are the pseudonyms of a couple of Turkish art smugglers from Dan Hofstadt's book "Goldberg's Angel." Abscam was real (although the later revival of that operation, depicted in this story, didn't happen) and a convicted con man actually did help out the FBI. He also used the FBI's setup of a fake business in order to run a sideline scam that netted $150,000 from various investors. "The Friendly Call" is the title of one of O. Henry's stories about con men.


End file.
